Discard Trope: ArbitrarilySerializedSimultaneousAdventures

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Created By: Koveras on July 1, 2012 Last Edited By: Koveras on August 15, 2012

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ArbitrarilySerializedSimultaneousAdventures

Video game characters have simultaneous adventures. You have to play through all of them, in any order.

Name Space:Main

Page Type:Trope

In most games, you steer a single character through a continuous adventure. This is about when a game allows you to sequentially take control of multiple characters on chronologically simultaneous adventures in any order you desire. This can happen at the beginning (overlapping with Multiple Game Openings) or in the middle of the game (possibly after Let's Split Up, Gang moment), but you always have to complete all of them before proceeding to the next stage. The key component here is that the player can choose the order to complete the individual story branches (especially relevant if they have varying difficulty) and, occasionally, may even switch between them at any time.

Contrast Synchronous Episodes, where the order you play the parallel adventures in is predetermined, and Multiple Game Openings, where you only play through one of the parallel intros while the others remain unseen.

Examples:

Fighting Games

Although each character's arc in The Black Heart has a chronological order, the order they can be played in is entirely up to the player.

Platform Games

In Sonic Adventure, you have six playable characters whose individual stories you have to complete before unlocking the final story that connects all six.

Likewise, in Sonic Adventure 2, you play through two stories, which all take place simultaneously, each with three characters, and a final story that connects the two.

Ditto in Sonic Heroes, with four stories, each with three characters, and a final story that connects all four.

RPG -- Eastern

In Wild ARMs 1, you have a choice of three possible player characters but actually have to play through all of their origins, which all converge at the initial Castle.

Likewise, Wild ARMs 3 has four main characters and you have to play all of their starting stories before they all meet during the Train Robbery.

Final Fantasy VI includes multiple instances of the party splitting up and going off on separate adventures before joining forces again. In almost every case, you get to pick the order you tackle said adventures in, and their difficulty and length vary greatly.

In Rudra No Hihou, you have to play through the simultaneous scenarios of three main characters (Sion, Surlent and Riza) before they all converge into Dune's scenario that completes the game. Unusually, you could switch between their stories at any time from the loading screen.

The DLC in Borderlands ends up like this; each expansion takes place after the main quest (presumably one after the other), but you can access and play them all at any time (in fact the first DLC, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, can be completed before you've even left the first major hub, since you only need to be level 10 or so to play it).

^ You have to finish all of the stories to unlock the final one. In SA and SH, each character (or set of three characters in SH) is a seperate story. For example, in SA, you can play three stages of Sonic's story, and then go back to the menu and select Tails' story, and you would be at the first stage. If you switch back to Sonic's story, you will be right before the fourth stage. They seem similar in structure to Rudra No Hihou, based on the above description. In SA 2, you have two stories with three characters each. Within each story, you have to play along the linear order of characters, bu you can switch stories at any time from the menu.

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